Blue Vervain Benefits - Clearpath School of Herbal Medicine

Hey, Chris Morano here, Clear Path Herbals at Brooks Bend Farm at Medicine Gardens, Clear Path Medicine Gardens. I'm here on a July 25th day, high summer, and standing next to blue vervain. This is a native plant, Verbena hastata is its scientific name, and I think its most preferred habitat would be like damp meadows. You'll oftentimes see this growing out in low damp areas where you might see the invasive purple loosestrife growing. This will be growing amongst it. Of course, this is native and not invasive, so we encourage its growth. This is one of the plants that decided that it liked our garden, but it couldn't care less where we thought it should be. When we first planted a bed of this, it was on the other side of the garden, and just hated it there. One plant, but every year we would just see it pop up two or three other places, and now we just let it do what it wants, and it just seems to be nomadic, likes to visit other beds, likes to go where it wants, and we let it because it's beautiful, and it doesn't take over like other plants we have, like spearmint, let's say. So this is the medicine. It's a perennial. It's a late bloomer. This one is just coming into its prime now, and even though it's called blue vervain, this color looks decidedly more purple to me than blue, and you notice as the flowers come up this tapered edge, it leaves seeds behind. So its flower is started down here, and then it continues flowering up and making these tapers longer and longer, and we're going to grab this medicine very shortly because it's in prime time. The leaf, the upper soft stem, and the flower is the medicine, and you can make it fresh in tincture form, you can make a fresh tea, you can dry it for tea later on, and to me this is one of my most favorite nervous system mental-emotional medicines. I love the combo of this and motherwort. A lot of my herbal students and apprentices have come to that decision and conclusion on their own because it works so damn well as a mental-emotional tonic. It's very useful for nervous system, kind of windy activity, like jagged emotions, hard to hold a stable ground. It feels like your mind and your thoughts and your emotions are all over the place and you wish you could just anchor them and have like a neutral position instead of just going from one gear to another and grinding through, you know, come back to neutral. If you remember the old manual clutch days of cars, I also say that Blue Vervain helps to re-establish that ambassador voice in you, the one that you consider to be most grounded and stable and clear-thinking, clear-minded. So it's famous in female reproductive menstrual irregularity complaints, especially if there is a nervous system component where the woman's complaining about, not even complaining, it's true, that her emotions just get thrown all about as she's coming into her moontime PMS where the mental-emotional complex is most affected. So this is how I use it predominantly, but not just for female reproductive complaints. I use it just as much in male-men formulas, children formulas, old age formulas. It doesn't matter because it's working on the nervous system regardless of what sex you may be. In addition to being a really great nerve tonic in terms of calming the emotions, it's also a nerve tonic for helping to strengthen tired, frayed nerves, feeling burned out like you're burning the candle at both ends and your mind is just getting kind of clouded and dull, hard to stay bright. And Blue Vervain works really well there. Even though this is native medicine and not in the Chinese Materia Medica, I think of this plant as serving double duty from the Chinese side of things. They speak of liver constraint and liver wind, and it's too much to go into detail of what this means and why they speak so much about the liver when they're talking about nervous system mental-emotional issues. But constraint is feeling more like ratcheted down and tight and a feeling you can't get out of a place, a dark place or a stuck place. And wind, liver wind means, like I said, you're getting blown all around. You're feeling like you're unanchored in a windstorm. You don't have a deep keel or a good rudder. And Blue Vervain works even better there. So whether you're agitated and stressed or you are windy or you are tired and feeling like your nervous system needs a good boost, Blue Vervain is really valuable, major medicine. And as you can see, the pollinators love them. It's a honeybee, little flies, tinier bees, and I just love its color. And it's got an interesting taste. It's bitter, but with a kind of aromatic bouquet. I wouldn't call it the tastiest tea, but it does work wonders through the nervous system. So yeah, that's what I want to say about Blue Vervain. And I'm happy we were able to catch it in prime time and not just pointing it after it went totally to seed. So thanks for joining in. See ya.